Karafuto

Karafuto is the Japanese name for Sakhalin Island, a large island in the North Pacific off the coast of Siberia. The name is written in kanji as 樺太 and was used by the Empire of Japan during its administration of the territory.

From 1905 to 1945, Sakhalin was organized as Karafuto Prefecture, a prefectural dependency of Japan with its capital at Toyohara, today Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. The prefecture encompassed the southern part of the island and developed industries such as fishing, forestry, mining, and oil extraction. A substantial Japanese settler population lived there alongside indigenous and Russian communities.

At the end of World War II, Soviet forces occupied Sakhalin. The island was incorporated into the Soviet Union, and after the war, Japan renounced its claims to the territory in the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1951). The city of Toyohara was renamed Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in 1946. The island remains part of Russia, now within Sakhalin Oblast; most former Japanese residents were repatriated to Japan in the late 1940s and 1950s, though some families and sites tied to the former administration remain.